American Apocalypse (7 page)

“You are part of the clan, and you got your ass kicked.” This kind of pissed me off, and it also gave me a shot of anxiety. Was I no longer welcome because I had lost?
Damn
, I really was getting used to my bed and private bathroom.

“The clan leaders sent word that as soon as you had recovered, the guys that did this to you would have to get payback—if only to send the message that our clan cannot be disrespected in this way.” She continued, “We would have already gone on our own to take care of it, but you were the target, and you are new in the clan, so we waited for you to recover. We were sure that you would want to be there for the payback.” She grinned. She had a scary grin for someone so skinny and short.

“Hey, I appreciate that and all, but it’s my mess. I screwed up. I was doing a favor for Carol at the shelter like I told you. I got sloppy. My fault—my job to fix it.”

Night stared at me, grinned, and said, “If you change your mind, let us know and we will be ready.” I didn’t know if they were really ready or not. I did know that she impressed the hell out of me, and it changed the way I looked at the clan.

I woke up late a few mornings later to find I had company. He was sitting in my only chair, not doing anything. He was just sitting. I recognized him: He was the guy who had taped my ribs after my night in the woods.

“Ah . . . good morning.”

He just looked at me, his face totally expressionless. We did the manly man staring contest for a few minutes. I won; it was my freaking room. He spoke first: “You going to rise and shine, sleepyhead?”

“Sure.” I sat up, winced, and swung my legs over the side of the bed. And winced again. I was really, really going to hurt that asshole and his buddies. “Do me a favor. Throw me those pants.” I had a pair of cargo pants hung over the side of the chair. I loved cargo pants because they had more pockets than I had stuff. He threw them to me and I began the painful process of pulling them on.

“So what brings you here?” I asked.

“It is time to begin your training.”

“Ah, my training? That would be in . . . ?”

I was going to add something smart, but it was still early, and I couldn’t think of anything. Plus, there was an aura about him that made me hold my tongue. He reminded me of a cop or some of the retired army officers I had crossed paths with in my previous life. Then again, there was that crazed Indian Amway seller who was always hanging around the break room at work. They both had that same glint in the eyes that comes from seeing a different reality. I realized that saying the word
work
in my head sounded weird. It was as if it had become a word from another language, one I had known very well once. But then I had left that country and no longer spoke the language.

“Your training in self-defense—unless you think you’ve got a handle on it?”

Ouch. That was a little uncalled for
, I thought.

“So why me? How much? Why you?”

A faint smile. He replied, “You have been blessed.”

“Blessed? Blessed! What the hell kind of answer is that! Man, get the hell out of my room! Are you from the clan? I said I’d handle it!” I was getting pissed.

He didn’t move. He just raised his hand, palm forward. “Sit down, settle down, and all will be revealed.” I grumbled a bit and sat back down.

“Okay, I am settled.”

“I’m not from your clan. You have a friend who thinks you can benefit from some training.”

“Who—”

“Try listening for a little bit,” he said, cutting me off.

“Jeebus,” I muttered.

“You can call me Max. Carol asked me to do this. I owe her. You do not owe me. When we are done, we are done. I spent three tours in the ’Stan and Iraq with the 2/7 of the First Marine Division. After my discharge, I worked for LAPD as patrol officer in Rampart Division for a year. Since the budget cuts I have worked as a consultant.”

I mentally snorted at the “consultant” part. I knew that his bit about being sent from Carol would be easy enough to check. “Okay, when do we start?”

He got up from the chair. “Two weeks. I will come looking for you.” Then he let himself out the door.

That was another thing—I knew I had turned the dead bolt on that door the previous night. From now on, I was going to start wedging a chair under the doorknob.

A few days later, I was starting to feel better; plus, I was getting bored. I went looking for Night or one of the ninja boys. Hell, anybody would do. There is only so much time you can spend alone, even with a computer, before the need for human contact asserts itself. I wandered out of my room, walked down the sidewalk to the clan room, which was really just another room. The difference was, Night and her brood of ninjas kept a lot of their toys in there.

It served as their clubhouse, dining room, and computer room. It had a pretty decent server, a Cisco switch, and a UPS in the corner. There were four flat screens cabled to four boxes next to the server. Night and one of the ninjas were sitting together at the small table, which took up the space the bed once had. They were both staring at the same screen and laughing at whatever was on. I could hear Chinese coming from the speakers so I didn’t even bother to walk the extra few feet to look. I just eased down into one of the chairs. I watched them for a bit while they ignored me.

Night looked over the top of the screen eventually. “How you feeling?”

“Oh, I am all right. What are you watching?”

“Beheadings in China.”

“Okay, sounds exciting. So, you ever heard of a blond soldier-looking guy named Max?”

That got both of their attention. The ninja asked me, “You’ve seen him and lived?” I laughed and nodded.

“Don’t laugh, Gardener.” Night had gotten all serious on me; she went on. “He was famous before the Crash. He worked as a contract killer for the triads in California and here. He is an enforcer.”

Ninja boy nodded his head. “And a good one, too.”

“Triad killer my ass,” I told him. “If he’s a triad killer, then I’m Batman.”

I got up and immediately felt dizzy. Maybe coming here wasn’t such a good idea. I mumbled a good-bye and to the answering silence I left muttering, “Fuck ’em.”

When I got back to my room I grabbed the aspirin bottle off the nightstand, poured three into my hand, grimaced, and dry swallowed them. They went down rough, and I had to scramble for something to wash them down. The open can of soda that I grabbed to chase them with must have been three days old. That was really tasty.

I settled back on my bed, kicked off my shoes, and fell asleep imagining myself slipping through the woods, silent as a Siberian tiger, my camouflage ninja killer suit rendering me invisible to the human eye. Slashing through the woods, movements like liquid mercury, I hunted my prey in their blue plastic tents.

Two weeks later to the day I woke up to find Max in my room again. I glanced over and saw that my only chair was still wedged under the doorknob.
Hmmm, interesting
, I thought.
Maybe, just maybe, there’s something to this triad story
. I looked at him; he had followed my glance to the door and met my look with a faint smile. He tossed me a pair of pants from off the floor. I grabbed them out of the air, slid off the bed and into them, and stood up.

“So, Sensei, what is the plan?”

“Your first lesson is this: Don’t be more of an asshole than the situation calls for. My name is Max, not Sensei.”

Okay
, I thought.

Max jerked a thumb toward my door, “Let’s go for a drive.”

I grabbed my jacket and we left. I didn’t say anything. He had a long stride, and I had to stretch my legs to keep up. Eventually, I asked him, “So, are we going to your dojo?”

“We’re there.”

“Ah, we’re in the parking lot.”

“Very observant.” He clicked his remote to unlock his car. It was a Toyota Camry Hybrid, maybe a 2009. It was hard to tell as they all looked alike to me. It was silver and could have used a wash. This was not what I was expecting.

“This is your car?” He heard the disbelief in my voice.

“What? You have a problem with it? What the hell were you expecting, a tank?”

“No, no. No problem.”

I buckled myself in and adjusted the seat back. He started the car and we pulled out on to Route 50 headed east. Traffic wasn’t heavy even though it was still rush hour. The D.C. metro area was considered recession-proof once upon a time. Now, like the rest of the country, it was proving that nowhere was safe from a global depression. The last recessions had been bad in the D.C. area, I was told, but not as bad as everywhere else. That had always been true, until it wasn’t. Everyone had totally missed the structural change in the local economy. The metro area had once been a company town, with the company being the U.S. government. That was still big, but real estate in 2005 had become just as big.

There were also the parasites that hung off the body of the government. They had gorged themselves on taxpayer money since the Reagan administration. With that first windfall they had built their towers around the perimeter of the interstate that girded the capital city. Like castles of feudal lords, they housed tens of thousands of foot soldiers, all dedicated to reaping the harvest from the government money trees. It was a good time—until autumn came.

The government no longer had the money to support the programs that fed the money trees. It had turned out to be a perfect storm. The federal government hit the same brick wall that the state, county, and local governments did. The Fed just hit it later, and the aftereffect was larger. You can’t run a lot of expensive programs if the money is not coming in from taxes. There was another problem too; the world financial system turned to out to be insolvent and that created a whole bunch of expensive problems. In between the death of real estate, the financial system and the tax base crumbling, there just wasn’t enough juice left to power the local system, let alone keep an empire running.

The change was obvious to me as we drove toward D.C. Traffic was light. Light in this area meant rush hour just about anywhere else. I had driven this route before and knew the difference. We pulled off Route 50 and headed toward Clarendon. I tried making a bit of small talk, but all I got in return were grunts, so I decided to shut up, watch the scenery, and see how it played out. Max pulled off by the metro and parked next to a dumpster behind a Chinese restaurant.

“C’mon, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

We got out of the car and walked around the corner. There was a deli open that was serving breakfast. We got our coffee, went outside, and sat down in front of the place. It was cold enough that a faint wisp of steam escaped from my cup when I peeled back a section of the lid.

“So, you have any questions?”

I came close to spitting out my coffee when he asked me that.

“Yeah—what did you mean when I asked if we were going to your dojo? And when and where do we start training?”

He just stared across the street. Since we had sat down, four or five people had shown up to stand in line in front of a double door that opened onto the street.

“You see those people?”

“Yeah.”

“They’re lining up for the free breakfast. In ten minutes there will be fifty of them in line. I want you to imagine you’re working security and tell me who’s carrying a weapon. Then, I want you to tell me if they are any good with it.”

I sipped my coffee and took a look at the group: It was the usual polyglot mix that represented the new American polity around here and, as far as I knew, everywhere else. A couple of young black males looked like possible candidates, but I rejected that as profiling. So far, there was nothing I could see.

Max startled me a bit when he started talking. “You want training—maybe we will get that far, maybe we won’t. I can tell you one thing. You’re going to have to upgrade from your garden trowel. You got away with it once, but try more than that and you will find it will cause you more problems than it is worth.”

My blood went cold when I heard that. Time slowed down and I became very focused as I looked over at Max. He met my look with nothing: nothing in his eyes, nothing in his face. He was just there. “Yeah, I’ll keep that in mind.”

He nodded. “Listen to me. This isn’t about being a master of martial arts or being able to execute a fly at
thirty paces with a spitball while you sip a cold one. It’s all in your head. You get your head right, and the rest will follow—you understand this?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“When you get there, half your problems will be solved. You know why?” I figured this was a rhetorical question, so I just shook my head no.

“Because you change internally: You have a bit of it. Your aura, your energy changes. Civilians will see it and shut their eyes to it. The predators—they will see it and adjust accordingly. When the world is filled with sheep, why bother with a wolf? I am going to teach you how to be a wolf. Or in your case, maybe a big shaggy dog,” he laughed.

“Funny—really funny.”

“Listen up,” he said. “The first commandment is this:
You are not God.
You get to thinking you are and the next thing you know the real God sends around someone faster and smarter. Your job is to protect and serve—only that will justify the steps you will take.

“The second commandment is this:
Watch your perimeter.
That is, not just your personal space; sometimes it may be blocks or miles wide.”

That startled me. I had heard it before. I filed it away to ask him about it some other time.

“The third commandment is this:
When you commit, commit to kill—at whatever the personal cost.
You do not think about going into an engagement with the intent to frighten or wound; you are mentally prepared to escalate immediately to killing them.”